Bruce Schimmel at City Paper used his Loose Canon (get it?) column this week to make us aware of this really cool thing going on in Fishtown. Fishtown, of course, being the new home of "cool" now that Northern Liberties has become to expensive for cool to live.
Anyway, it seems that a particularly green-friendly developer named Patrick McDonald will give an electric car to anyone who purchases one of his LEED Gold certified homes. The homes go for over a half a million (uh-oh, looks like cool may be moving on to Bridesburg soon), but the car will cost you exactly zero in gas money:
With this house and car comes a dedicated parking spot and an electric socket built into the sidewalk so you can charge your car from your solar-paneled roof.
Schimmel's larger point in this column is to show how, in the absence of regulations in the building code that recognize elements of green building, green-friendly builders have taken a "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission" approach to their developments. Of course, it's a risky move when the alternative to "forgiveness" is being ordered to tear down a building or a feature that cost millions to create.
It's encouraging, though, that in this case, unlike the infamous Comcast waterless urinals (they're Comcastic!), the city has been more willing to grant forgiveness and embrace the new technology.
I'm hoping that someday this will lead to my almost cartoonish-super-villain vision to get Philadelphia completely off the grid and essentially turn the whole city (and its acres and acres of flat roofs and vacant land) into one big power plant for the surrounding region. Money spent by suburban folks for Philly Power can replace the commuter wage tax as the way of transferring suburban money into the city. Each house would look sort of like this diagram from an article in the January 2004 issue of Harvard Magazine:
Which is explained in this caption:
A future hydrogen-powered workplace. Fuel-cell-driven cars "gas up" on hydrogen (in yellow) piped from a natural-gas reformer, and send electricity (in red) back to the power controller outside the workplace. The power controller, running its own much-larger fuel cells, sends electricity and hot water (in blue) to the office building and can sell surplus electricity to the power grid, creating a revenue stream for the company.
So while I sit here twirling my mustache and try to figure out how to make this scheme come together, hopefully folks like Patrick McDonald keep on building houses that can power cars (and buses, other buildings, trains...)